Are
Christians Cannibals?
August
11, 2021
My mother, may she rest in peace, grew up in the church,
First Congregational Church of Valley City, North Dakota to be more precise
about it. She wasn’t a particularly religious or spiritual person, but she belonged
to and attended First Congregational Church of Eugene, Oregon, from 1947 when
the family moved to Eugene until physical limitations stopped her from
attending a few years before her death in 2006. So she had strong ties to the Congregational
Christian tradition, but there was one thing about Christian worship that she
could never accept. She would not participate in the sacrament of the
Eucharist. She wouldn’t because when that sacrament is performed properly it
calls the bread and wine used in it the body and blood of Christ.[1]
Mom always thought that that language turned the people who ate the bread and
drank the wine into cannibals. I’m sure she would have hated Bible verses like
John 6:54, where John’s Jesus says, “Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood
have eternal life.” NRSV
We cannot deny that Eucharistic language sounds like it is
inviting people into cannibalism. Yet of course countless generations of
Christians have partaken of the elements of the Eucharist without ever
understanding that what they were doing made them cannibals. How is that
possible? Well, different Christian traditions understand the Eucharist
differently. Within those differences there are at least two ways that give
ways of understanding the sacrament that obviate the possibility of the
sacrament being cannibalism. One is Roman Catholic, the other is more
contemporary and Protestant. We’ll take a look at both of them, starting with
the Roman Catholic one.
The Roman Catholic Church insists that the elements of the
sacrament truly are the real body and blood of Christ. The most common way,
though not necessarily a required one, that the Church explains the real
presence of the body and blood of Christ in the elements of the Eucharist is
called transubstantiation.[2]
That explanation is grounded in Aristotelean philosophy. Aristotle taught that
there are at least two aspects of every physical thing. There is the thing’s “substance,”
and there are the thing’s “accidents.” The substance of a thing is what it really
is in its deepest essence. The thing’s accidents are what we perceive of the
thing, what we see of it for example. A thing’s accidents can be quite
different from the thing’s substance. The theory of transubstantiation says
that in the course of the performance of the sacrament the substance of the
elements is changed but their accidents are not. That’s how the wafer and the
wine that the Church uses in the sacrament can still appear to be wafer and
wine while at a deeper level being in substance the body and blood of Christ. The
person partaking of the elements perceives that she is consuming wafer and
wine. The substances of those elements have, however, become the body and blood
of Christ.
The more modern, more Protestant explanation of the
Eucharist is that the elements are symbols. In this understanding the elements
remain physically what they are, bread and wine; but they function as symbols. A
symbol in this sense is a physical object (or and idea or a word) that mediates
transcendent reality to the person observing or manipulating the symbol.[3]
Think of a symbol as existing in two different realities at the same time. Or
think of a symbol as a bridge connecting two realities that otherwise would
remain separated from one another. The bread and wine of the Eucharist are
symbols in this sense. Even though we may never think of them as symbols they
do their symbolic work in us. That work is to connect us with God and God with
us. Thinking of the Eucharistic elements as symbols doesn’t change the physical
structure of the bread and wine. They remain bread and wine. Symbol is an
identity we lay on the elements. Being symbols deepens the thing’s spiritual
reality, but it doesn’t change the thing itself. I have experienced the reality
of Gd through understanding the bread and wine of the Eucharist as symbols. You
can too. Symbolism works.
Now of course, as is true of many different areas of human
endeavor, the benefits of both of these ways of avoiding the charge of
cannibalism that people like my mother make against the Eucharist come with
shortcomings or failings attached. The potential problem with transubstantiation
is that the so-called substance of the elements still becomes the real physical
body and blood Christ. That is, it is understood to be the real physical body
and blood of Christ. The person consuming the elements does not experience them
as human flesh and blood. Yet the teaching of the Church is that beneath their
physical presentation to us, that is, beneath their accidents in the
Aristotelean sense, they really have become the body and blood of Christ. The
Eucharist remains open to the charge of cannibalism. Moreover, the theory of
transubstantiation uses language and philosophical concepts that few people
know or can comfortably use. After all, who besides philosophers and Catholic
theologians thinks of any physical object as consisting as substance and
accidents? No one, or very nearly no one. Transubstantiation requires an
intellectual agility that the Church really cannot demand of most of the Church’s
people (or of any other people for that matter).
The problem with understanding the elements of the Eucharist
as symbols is that symbols come across to most of us as impersonal. Abstract.
Unable to participate in the deep relationships that often exist between people
and between people and God. The elements of the Eucharist as symbols is just an
idea. It can seem not to be alive. Moreover, symbol in the sense that I mean
here is something very few people actually understand. Symbols can and do work
in people who do not think of anything as a symbol. We are, however, far more
likely to experience a symbol as a symbol if we understand it as a symbol at
the outset.
So neither of these explanations of why consuming the Eucharistic
elements amounts to cannibalism is perfect. For me personally understanding the
elements of the sacrament as symbols works. Transubstantiation doesn’t. Perhaps
for you it’s the other way around. All that really matters is that however you
understand it, or even if you don’t understand it at all, you at least at times
feel the spiritual presence of Christ as you participate in the Eucharist. And
no, Christians are not cannibals.
[1]
Using texts like Matthew 26:28.
[2] The
Rev. Dr. Mike Raschko, a Roman Catholic priest and one of my seminary
professors, told us that what the believer must accept is the real presence of
the body and blood of Christ in the elements of the Eucharist. The believer may
but need not accept transubstantiation as an explanation of how the real body
and blood of Christ are present there.
[3] For
more on symbols see my Liberating Christianity, Overcoming Obstacles to
Faith in the New Millennium, (2008, Wipf and Stock Publishers, Eugene,
Oregon), pp. 24 to 28.
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